Keyword Bookmark Search with SAS Support

I had noticed recently that when I searched for SAS documentation on Google I wasn’t finding the SAS 9.4 documentation pages I wanted. I tweeted about it, found others had the same issue, and that SAS are working to address it. In the interim, the answer was simple of course … search using support.sas.com instead. However, I’m impatient and am used to just typing my query in the web browser address bar (e.g. sas 9.4 iomserverappender) and then clicking on the first or second link in the search results (when the search query is unique enough). It’s very fast. Finding and clicking a bookmark, waiting for the page to load, locating the search field on the page, typing in the query, clicking the submit button, waiting for the search results page to load, and clicking on the right link …. well that’s quite a bit more work! ;) [#FirstWorldProblems]

So, I’ve switched to using another method where I can keep typing my SAS 9.4 documentation search in the browser address bar AND use support.sas.com at the same time. It might even work out better than before.

Using these browser features, you can type a keyword (like sas94doc) in the address bar and everything that is typed after it gets sent to the bookmarked search URL as a parameter – you use %s in the URL to indicate where the search query (less keyword) should go.

These are the ones I’m now using for searching SAS Support and some other SAS Software related sites:

I hope you find these useful too. I know they work in Chrome, Chromium, and Firefox. I have yet to try Internet Explorer or Edge. Please note that some of these may break if SAS Support search is changed in future. If you find they no longer work let me know and I’ll update them as appropriate.

9 thoughts on “Keyword Bookmark Search with SAS Support”

This is a good choice for searching the documentation, but I use a different approach for blogs, support community, and blogs. The method you describe returns the search results from the website, but those results might be in a format that is less succinct than the results from primary search engines. An alternative is to use the SITE: keyword in the search box of your favorite search engine. For example:

Thanks for adding that tip – that’s a great one. I have used it myself from time to time and also found that negating it with a -site:example.com can sometimes come in handy too – like when I remember I saw something, can’t remember exactly where, but know it wasn’t from a large site that might otherwise swamp the results.

One of the main reasons I switched to using the SAS support search facility is because much of the SAS 9.4 documentation I was looking for (admin and metadata related) did not seem to be indexed by Google – lots of SAS 9.2 and 9.3 but no 9.4. Chris said it was an issue the SAS pubs folk were working to address. As an added bonus I could also use different keyword-bookmark-searches to filter just for doc pages or notes – something I couldn’t do as easily with Google search operators.

Thanks much for this tip, Paul. Googling for SAS docs and getting only 9.3 results has been a persistent annoyance. And every time I click on a google link to an old 9.3 doc, I feel like I’m just contributing to the problem by up-voting the 9.3 page ranks. This approach looks very promising.